Headstrong
by Donator
Summary: Pay a visit to the Congo, before they call it Zaire again. UPDATED 9
1. Headstrong Chapter 1

**Lara Croft**

**-**

**HEADSTRONG**

I was following an underground river, numbingly cold water already up to my bosom and a strong current to fight against. The best thing you could do against varicosities according to Dr. Kneipp, but I wasn't exactly doing something for my health in this uncomfortable, pitch dark, stalactite riddled hole. I had only just faced the options of blasting a hole into a sealed door that was easily three thousand years old or trying to find a devious route. As I wasn't exactly in a hurry, I had decided on playing the responsible Archaeologist for once. I only stopped to enjoy it when my maglite dropped into the water and left me alone in the dark, dumbfounded by disorientation.

That it had begun to heavily rain outside I was oblivious to, but that as a direct result the water was rapidly rising, in fact reaching my neck in under two minutes, THAT seriously picked on my nerves. Before I was going to be drowned dead I rather accepted that a whole day of cave lurking had been fruitless and gave up fighting to let myself flush out of the tunnel by the current. I got bonked around pretty bad, a lot of bruises and scratches. My head spun when I climbed onto dry land.

Ten minutes later I had plastic explosives planted all over the door and blasted a fine, well rounded hole into it, like I should have done right from the beginning.

It was a grave. A nice grave, a beautiful grave. Pretty, solid architecture, all made of rocks, cubic cut and hand polished. Perfectly fit together, hardly a fissure between them although there was not the hint of cement in use. Admitted, dust was piling to the ceiling, the cobwebs could almost be used as a hammock and half of the tombs living inhabitants could kill you with a single sting, but… classy. Hardly did I ever see a burial chamber not yet invaded by the elements, and believe me, shovelling a way through the mud is not quite what you came for when you're looking for antiquities.

As the Okawombee had been too primitive to construct effective traps, been a harmonic, pacifistic lot of people in general and my usual routine of trap detection (checking the floor for mossy fissures that could indicate pressure plates, the wall for holes where spikes or darts could emanate from and finally throwing a few heavy objects around for covering the unpredictable) had a negative outcome I decided to make camp here. Hey, it was dry, cool, the air bearable and all in all the most civilised surrounding I had been in since I set my foot to Zaire. I think they named it back to Congo some time ago, but that hardly interests me. When I've got used to see people die, why should I care for sleeping in a grave?

Maybe I should explain what I was doing here. Not that it was necessary, but it makes things easier to understand. Britain holds nothing that justifies spending those thirty lousy November days on the island, that's why you might stumble across the ingenious sight of a woman in boots and knickers gently swinging in a hammock at the moment, at least if you're nosy and happen to be on a hike through the rainforests of central Africa. Well, keeping dry is one of the prime rules to heed on expeditions, wear airtight Lycra on wet skin in a tropic environment and you will be rewarded a nasty case of jungle decay in no time. I just love the 'Democratic Republic of Congo' as it is called now. Simply because the five most beautiful national parks of the world are here, and they're all in rebel controlled area.

The fighting has been really bad in the early sixties, but even if the political situation is somewhat stable now, since it's discovery in 1876 by H.M. Stanley, the land had seen about as much peacetime as the Balkans. Independence from Belgium in 1960, free elections, the first prime minister Lumumba is obviously overtaxed by his job, the very same year you have the first military revolt, the rich province Katanga declares independence itself. Lumumba calls the UN for help, which probably results directly in him being assassinated. Violence and bloodshed everywhere. 1964 the Americans make Tschombe the new head of state, 65' we have Kasavubu, 66' General Mobutu Sese Seko and about a million dead people by now. 71' he renames the land Zaire, 97' after the fall of Mobutu, Kabila names it back to Congo. And so on, and so on...

I left my travel companions from BBC further down south, somewhere near Kolwezi, where they observe the tensions with Angola, to travel further north along the Lualaba river and through the Upemba-national park. They'll later follow me north to report about the aftershocks of the war with Rwanda, but I've already been there 98' and still have nightmares: what had started out as a rather tiny tribal conflict soon developed an unstoppable dynamic similar to a bushfire, the two biggest ethnical groups in the country started whacking at each other and every country in the surroundings rushed to butt in. Abracadabra, we have what soon will be called the first African world war. And its FAR from over yet, with entire landscapes stuffed with refugees, and even worse, a whole lot of marauding Hutu-militias still genociding through the jungle like a mob of angry leaf-cutter ants.

Upemba was nice, I found a whole lot of Hippos there, one of their ancestors is probably responsible for my grandfathers disappearance in this region. My destination was the upper valley of one of it's side arms that has yet to be named and the Kobutu waterfalls, probably one of the hardest to reach places on the globe, even if you were parachuting. Really peaceful there.


	2. Headstrong Chapter 2

I had developed an attitude of introverted hedonism these past weeks, true, nevertheless I was now able to enjoy the sight of water drops drying on my lazy legs without a plaster or seams spoiling it. Above me was nothing but jungle, no people in a fifty kilometres radius, hardly a nutty biologist chasing gorillas even. The tomb by itself, nice as it was from a Historian's point of view, was thoroughly uninteresting on behalf of valuables. It would have surprised me to find something though, as back then people had not yet discovered how to melt precious metals, traded by bartering crop and pigs and lived probably ten times happier then today in their little villages. And even if they waged war against each other, each skirmish was a festival that held more similarity to the carnival in Rio than to a serious fighting: men fought nude, pompously decorated with feathers and once someone was injured the war was over, because killing a human was unthinkable.

I feel like an alien down here, and dream of an age where men had been fighting for swine, land and women, not some abstract problem with ideologies.

In the jungle, everything you leave on the floor will definitely be eaten. That's a rule. And centipedes the length of a man's forearm just laugh at insecticides, so you better sleep in a hammock and put some glue to the cords that hold it up so nothing can climb up and surprise you. Remembering how I had woken up with a spider roughly five centimetres in diameter running over my cheek once I put on an extra layer of glue now, right after drilling two crooks into opposite walls to support my resting place. There was fresh water running nearby and soon I had a fire going, so I started to look through my backpack for something eatable. Even if the jungle above was stuffed with the most exotic delicates, I wasn't in the mood to try out if my intestines could digest them without protesting through diarrhoea. Above all it was still raining.

Let's see, ... all-purpose tarpaulin, small set of tent pegs, spirit stove, a sewing kit, set of reserve clothes, underwear, socks, mittens, bonnet, crockery, twenty leaves of toilet paper, raincoat, flare gun, compass, soap, towel, water flask, roadmap, all rounder antidote in a combo pen, med kit, searchlight, combat knife, magazine pockets, a length of nylon cable, carbines... oh, and finally a hunter pack of dehydrogenated food.

God forbid I ever have to eat one of those things. Dissolve a white powder in water and you have either goulash or strawberry yoghurt, depending on what's printed on the package: That's unnatural, even by my standards. An hour later I had a collection of bananas and a few melon like fruits that tasted like a floury sort of peach. After that meal I almost felt new born, gently swinging in my hammock, the dampness steaming from my clothes, playing with my new Beretta 92FS Tactical pistol, a special mark three edition I had been asked to test under field conditions. Well, for shooting bananas from a tree there has never been a better weapon.

Just when I felt perfectly comfortable, satiated, calm, happy... a little sleepy maybe, like you always become if you move around too quickly in a 45°C / 100 humidity environment... it dawned to me that something was extremely wrong here. There was no corpse. In fact, the complex I had found had no purpose at all, at least not here. A tomb? For whom? The tribes had never had kings. Shamans were respected and feared, but never that important to construct a crypt of this finesse and dimension. The dead had been burned, and the ash used for all kinds of ceremonials. So a temple maybe? Even more unlikely. In those times, people prayed to the spirits of nature. You do that in the jungle, maybe on a mountain top, not in a damp hole underground. Maybe I had misdated my find, but how much I strained my memory, for all it was worth I couldn't remember a culture that highly developed to construct a subterranean cult place in this region.

Now, bless me, this was finally going to be interesting after all...

Soon I had distributed all devices in my pack that were capable of shedding light evenly across the room, then I began to exterminate the more dangerous of the critters running all about walls and floor. Nothing's worse for an Archaeologist than unhealthy working conditions, and you don't want to meet a Tongo-scorpion eye to eye when you're lying flat on your belly searching for hidden passages.

As much as I searched, I didn't find any inscriptions. That was nothing unusual, being capable of constructing stone walls doesn't automatically go together with the development of script. All in all the 'tomb' did look rather dull, seen in plain light, it was a rather large room, about fifteen to ten steps square with a comfortable height, the only entrance being the heavy stone seal I had blasted through earlier.

A storage of some sort? A granary maybe?

That sounded just plausible first, but even if there had been agricultural activities in this region, which probably never happened, I should have found some remains, if not from the corn then from some of the containers where it had been carried in. I didn't. And finally, who would seal a granary with nothing inside? That would be just stupid. You would only seal a place to keep what's inside save.

Or what's outside...

I hate this feeling. Most definitely. It creeps up your spine like a thousand ants, making you feel all hot and cold at the same time, with all of your body hairs fully erect. This is telling you that you are in danger. At the same time the adrenaline rush kicks in, literally, it feels like a wild horse hoofing you into the stomach. That way your body says you've to do something. And finally the little knock, knock in your brain, when you're standing outside of the door, panting, gun aimed at the hole in it, waiting for god knows what to appear... that definitely assures you that you're a paranoid jack-ass.

As much as I would love to tell you about an hour long, victorious fight with an ancient spider-spirit-goddess-something... in fact all that happened was that I slept quite comfortably and still had no idea what this thing was when I awoke from a long, refreshing and dreamless sleep next morning.

With a machine pistol pointed at my nose.


	3. Headstrong Chapter 3

The teenager was rather tall and gaunt for his age, about thirteen or fourteen I guess, black like coal and the sweat mirroring on his bald shaved head. He was wearing an olive coloured uniform but no insignia of any kind on it that could have indicated what army he belonged to. The tightly closed lips were broken up and swollen as if he had run into a brawl.

First, I was baffled.

Nobody was supposed to be around here. I cursed at my carelessness. Usually nobody manages to sneak up to me, even when I'm asleep. The gun was gently pressed against my face, more than close enough to wrench it from his grasp, I thought, but then I looked at his eyes. They were a deep yellow, probably from a serious case of hepatitis as steroids were an unlikely reason around here, but also of a distinct, calm coldness I was very familiar with, so I dropped the idea of putting up a fight for now. This kid had already killed in his life.

My pistol was in the backpack, and that was hanging by the wall behind my head. Even worse, I felt I was going to yawn any moment, and couldn't hold it back. As much as I tried, all my self-control managed was to keep my mouth closed, but still my face must have strangely distorted, as my assailant flinched and jumped back at the groaning sound and the grimace. That was my chance...

It took little more than a small jolt of my legs and the hammock had turned a full 180 degrees upside down, dropping me to the floor out of the line of fire. I had given myself a fifty-fifty chance and expected a deafening roar of the machine pistol to rip through the air where my head had been a mere fraction of a second ago, but it didn't come. Maybe his reflexes were worse than I had thought, but already in full motion and hardly thinking about what I was doing I kicked at his legs for all it was worth and cleanly swept him off his feet, the gun now clattering across the floor. I am not very quick at realising when I have won, especially when I'm angry and someone threatens me, so I jumped at him before he could scramble to his feet again. "Just earned yourself a serious smack-bottom..." I thought, when I grabbed him by his arm and leg, simply throwing his lame forty-five kilos above my head and across the room like a wrestling star.

Played enough. I picked up the machine pistol and aimed the short barrel at him, determined to get a few answers, only to find out there was no ammo left in the clip. I whistled silently at my own luck, pretty sure that I could have been dead and cold by now if this little brat had had a knife or a last bullet in his weapon.

Obviously I hadn't impressed him enough yet, as he was already leaping at me with something that looked like a very well motivated, but extraordinary badly performed running punch. I must have nearly broken his thin arm I remembered later, when I grabbed his wrist and slammed my full weight back- forward into his chest, finally flipping him rather inelegantly over my hip. After a violent crash that made me fear I had fractured his spine, he finally remained unmoving on the cave floor.

Whoa. What's a shower and a massage compared to that to get you going in the

morning?!

As my visitor had somewhat glassy eyes and overall appeared a bit stunned, I thought it a good time to retrieve my pistol from the pack. For all I knew, a whole lot of his comrades could have dropped in any second. The thing he had put at my nose was an elongated, stone age Ingram model, but you could feed it with nine millimetre bullets, which was rather practical right now as I carried about two hundred shots of that calibre with me.

The kid soldier gradually recovered and, now weapon less, tried to make a break for it, so I decided it was time to establish communications, started by planting my boot on his chest and demonstrating my take on the situation by displaying a nine millimetre orifice from the business end. Astoundingly, he wasn't even afraid, wriggled like a fish. English didn't work, neither did French. Espanola earned me a few gestures how he intended to fuck me once he had beaten me. I tried a few more, but it was a rather tiring situation with no positive outcome possible. What he was yelling and babbling sounded like one of the several Bantu dialects spoken around here, but I didn't understand a single word of it, as long as it wasn't enhanced by voice level and expletive gestures.

This left me with the tough decision of what to do with him now.

I am no humanitarian. What for? I knocked him out cold and then started packing my things as fast as I could to get away before I had to wallop him another one. Stupid child. Just when I start to enjoy myself, as always, someone has to spoil it. A picture of myself, gently rocking in my hammock, eating one of these melon like things popped up in my mind, and I had to fight back the sudden urge of kicking him in the ribs.

Curious as I am, I rifled through his pockets before I left the cave, thoroughly surprised at what I found. I found a small pouch, and thirty-seven little diamonds inside it...

…


	4. Headstrong Chapter 4

The guidebook formulates the general situation in a rather decent way: '_Following the assassination of his father Laurent Kabila on January the 16th in 2001, Joseph Kabila succeeded to the presidency. Conditions improved in late 2002 with the withdrawal of a large portion of the invading foreign troops, and negotiations with rebel leaders led to the establishment of a transitional government in July 2003. The war has dramatically reduced national output and government revenue though, and considerably increased external debt._'

So far so good. In short: The average Congolese is sixteen years old, male, a war orphan and HIV positive. Congo is piss-poor, the war has bled it to death. The country is badly short of foreign exchange, no wonder, the financial system is so underdeveloped nobody bothers to use it for money-laundering, and there are only very few international investors willing to risk their cash in a region that is so politically unstable. Most of the companies who dare to come despite the tremendous risks are dealing in the exploit of natural resources, mining corporations, metal traders, oil tycoons and so on. Congo could be the richest land on the continent if it wanted to, but while everybody could be rich like a Saudi oil sheikh, corruption is so bad the nationwide number of water closets remains in the single digits.

To me this is Eldorado. After a generous donation to the 'Union for Democracy and Social Progress' I was invited on a safari with the province governor of Katanga, had a glamorous dinner with the provisional secretary of foreign relations and two elite paratroopers were assigned to my personal protection when I uttered my desire to take a stroll through the local ivory market. Quite charming at first, when the official attention began to peeve me I packed my things and toddled off for the mountains.

Ah yes, a decent number of the bigger diamond mines has been kept going by foreign investments I was told, but by the time my interest in this region had started, many were already preparing to pull out. The reason was simple: they had been robbed.

Repeatedly.

…

Why did I not run off without caring? Retrospectively, the brightest thing to do probably would have been to return the pouch to his pocket and put the empty weapon back in his hand before disappearing in the jungle like a ghost. Really should have done that. Well, hindsight is easier than foresight, and that later my find would have tragic consequences was clearly an error on my behalf, but in a different way than you might think now. Maybe I was just bored and became nostalgic and light-headed when playing with my newly acquired machine-pistol, who knows.

I had kept the diamonds and posted myself outside the cave to follow the kid once he would regain consciousness. Tracking him through the jungle was an easy task then as he ran like mad, not looking right or left, trampling a broad trail through the coppice that was almost impossible to lose. His speed was impressive nevertheless, especially without the aid of a machete. I had once read in Livingston's diaries how he had suspected the natives to have some magic agreement with the bushes that only Westerners were to be harassed. Superstition, yes. It sure looks plausible though…

I was honestly sweating and panting with stitches in the side by the time the kid's tracks led me to a small camp. I'm not out of shape. Damn climate. And nobody runs like a man afraid. Now, pressing a hand against my ribs to ease the ache, I warily worked my way through the underwood until I found a nice elevated spot on a protruding rock, overgrown and reasonably suited to observe the nearby ongoing without me being too easy to discover in the bushes. The cover was a most essential advantage, as the first thing that caught my eye was another half dozen uniformed first-graders with AK's on guard, warily scanning the area. With a curse I pulled my head down.

Several jeeps and a small army truck were vaguely parked in a circle here, with the tarpaulin covering the truck loosened on one side and supported outwards using two metal poles, to form some makeshift protection against the weather. The heavy rainfall had transformed the dirt road into a shallow and muddy creek overnight, so the convoy had probably stopped at this highly welcome dry place to wait for the worst to pass. I finally found my binoculars and, lying flat on my belly, kept them pressed against my eyes with the left, continually spying for signs that would indicate what those guys were doing here, while hastily chambering rounds into my pistol magazines with the right. Quite a tricky business, as munitions tend to corrode quickly in this constant wetness and are best kept in an oily glibber that unfortunately also makes them slippery like snails in a French restaurant.

In the end I spotted the little brat I had been following and immediately realized my former stupidity: some uniformed two-hundred pounds of solid muscle, wearing a red beret, a gold chain and the tawdriest of sunshades you only find on soldiers and in Terminator movies, calmly had a foot on his neck. I couldn't see at the distance, but I guess he had beaten the kid senseless, and now he was holding an angry speech to the remaining members of his small force, who obviously had to watch the scene. Most of it was drowned out by the rain for me, but I could see him all the while randomly pointing his revolver at various onlookers. Guess he didn't believe the story he had been told. When finally hoarse from all the yelling, Mr.Big holstered the revolver and menacingly displayed a hunting knife.

Just fucking great.

I'd had my chance to chicken out and carelessly wasted it. So, no doubt this is soon going to end in a messy atrocity, and no matter how hard-boiled I consider myself, to witness something like this will haunt me in my sleep the next couple years, especially since I'll have to take most of the blame for it myself this time.

No time left to spend pondering, I get going. The sentries are fortunately behaving like children and have meanwhile pretty much all abandoned their post to watch the ongoing in the camp, so I easily come into hearing range with little danger of being detected. Cowering in the last couple specks of high grass, only an arm's length away from the first jeep, I wait with held breath, trying to keep my heartbeat under control. I can't see any more what happens, with the vehicles blocking most of my view, but the whole camp has begun chanting something that sounds to me like 'Punta!… Punta!…', in a tone very similar to cheering kids watching a schoolyard fray. I ask myself, are they mad? 'Goddamn Croft, what have you gotten yourself into here?', I mumble absent-mindedly.

Indeed, what am I doing here? I swallow dryly and look down at my hands. My finger knuckles are protruding white through the skin, so hard my fist is clenching the pistol handle. Shooting a totally unknown in the back is easier said then done, murdering lunatic or not, especially when you have a flock of children watching. 'Stupid, self-righteous bitch…', I curse at myself, then leap from my hiding spot and cover the last few metres of open ground that separate me from the outer side of the truck in a quick crouch run. Praying that nobody has seen my feet and with my back pressed firmly against the tyre below the driver's cab I wait, only the vehicle's breadth remaining between me and the madness. The continuous chanting is increasingly unnerving, I feel a growing lump in my throat and press the cold barrel of the gun against my forehead, while slowly counting to ten to calm myself.

Breathe, woman…

High time for a plan. I take a deep breath, slowly let two thirds out and then hold it. I look at my hands again. In my imagination I see this soldier lying dead in his blood and all those small yellow eyes accusing me and I know I can't shoot. Maybe if he started to cut up that kid I could, but well, do I really want to find out? Angrily I wipe an annoying strand of wet hair from my face and glancing down myself it occurs to me that I have another gun in my left holster, even though I definitely remember bringing only the Beretta on this trip. It's my flare gun. I must have accidentally put it there out of habit when I hid my backpack near the cave. Crack shot or not, it's hard to hit a barn door at ten yards with this thing, but those coloured magnesium globes burn hot as hell and should considerably hurt at point blank, or at least keep that guy busy for awhile.

Damn! I wince at the sudden, high-pitched scream that rips through the air. Oh please, please… without further consideration I jump up, turn round and shoot.


	5. Headstrong Chapter 5

The infinitesimally brief blink of an eye long everything was frozen, stood perfectly still. I had aimed square at his back, but the whizzing red fireball hit Mr.Big only barely above the arse. Now everything was panic and pandemonium. One second to another Mr.Big had turned into a roaring knot of wildly flailing limbs engulfed in a cloud of red smoke and was madly rolling and floundering in the slush. Lucky for him his uniform had already been soaked, or else maybe he would have caught fire as a whole. My surprise appearance definitely scared the shit out of the kids first, some of the smaller ones dropped their guns and ran away yelling, one even fell flat on his back with a frightened scream, others, who probably had some fighting experience already, jumped for cover, while most just remained standing and stared at me with their mouths gaping wide open.

Unfortunately it didn't take the leader long to recover from the initial shock, but by the time he had his revolver out and started firing in my direction I was running like hell and had already disappeared in the surrounding vegetation. Now, my grasp of Swahili might be close to nonexistent, but 'Kill the witch!' sounds something like 'Boom-Kabeee!' and has been yelled in my direction quite frequently in Africa already during my career, usually right before lead began flying the wrong direction, so one day I had looked it up.

I purposely took the exactly same route back that I had come earlier and astoundingly, even though I heard numerous pursuers behind me, lots of yelling and even occasional gunfire, the former tension had completely worn off and I flew through the jungle with neither them nor the truculent plant life bothering me much. Maybe because this time I had a plan.

At the first opportunity, in a place with particularly dense bushes and a couple of low growing trees, I jumped to grab an overhead branch and, after an inset of high bar acrobatics, began climbing as fast as I could. Simple tricks always work best and indeed, thinking that I was still ahead of them because of the well-visible trail of trampled plants and broken perches ahead, a flock of raging persecutors soon passed right below me. Fools. Had they been skilled monkey-hunters like their grandfathers I would have lain dead at their feet by now, but at that noise level the horde was likely going to chase me another half hour, maybe even all the way back to the cave, before anybody would notice that I was gone.

It was hard to stifle a mischievous chuckle when finally the groaning and cursing big man came hobbling past, caked in mud from head to toe and with an impressive burn mark garnishing his backside. I kept my index finger pointed at the back of his head while he passed, and my lips subconsciously formed a soundless 'Boom!' right before he moved out of sight. After slowly counting to one-hundred I gently lowered myself down to the ground and hustled off in the opposite direction.

Even though the camp looked completely deserted an appearance can be deceiving, so I briefly stopped at the last row of trees and threw a fist sized rock that noisily smashed one of the truck's rear lights, but it didn't provoke any reactions. Obviously had everybody either joined the manhunt or fled, and as nothing down there or in the surroundings appeared suspicious to me, I cautiously went on.

I found the kid right where I had last seen him. He was still lying face down in the dirt, motionless. The air suddenly felt a few degrees colder the moment I noticed the colour of the ground around him and the deep gash on his throat. I couldn't force myself to look away, only wonder how much blood had fit into this thin little body. With a profane curse I threw the empty flare gun into the woods, and even though I already knew the outcome I nevertheless bent down to check his pulse before I straightened myself and began to search the camp for information. I had waited too long, he was dead.

Usually I regard such things none of my business, I didn't have a crusade in mind at that time, understand me right, but a morbid curiosity about the greater coherences of what I had witnessed began to form inside me. People die without any reason, everywhere, all the time, but maybe not in this case. I quickly ploughed through the sparse equipment lying around, but the troops had brought very little with them aside from their guns, mostly fuel, munitions, water and canned food. The truck contained some pioneer equipment, absolutely essential for quick movement in this green hell, a couple small shovels, a chainsaw, an axe, a crowbar, a toolbox, a length of thick rope, even a few sticks of dynamite, but nothing that would have been of particular interest to me. I broke into a sweat. It's hard to keep your cool, constantly in danger of being surprised by a flock of homicidal children emerging from the jungle to find you snooping in their stuff, but there had to be a clue somewhere. There just had to be…

Out of pure luck I noticed that one of the jeeps had an inconspicuous little metal box lashed in place where all the others had a reserve canister. It was locked, and I was about to shoot it open, but then fortunately remembered the crowbar on the truck. The contents finally began to shed some light on the situation: along with a sturdy tornister radio I found some handwritten code-tables, that additionally had numerous frequencies and call-signs scribbled all over them, something that appeared to be a timetable of some sorts, a good military map of the area, where several nearby locations were marked and numbered with a waterproof black felt pen, and finally and most notably, a brand new GPS receiver. I whistled through my teeth in amazement. Bingo.

It would take some time to make sense of all that, so I hastily stuffed the papers under my shirt, the receiver into a pocket and prepared to pull out. Though before I could leave I needed to hinder the troop's mobility and disrupt communication, or my actions would quickly be reported. Two bullets silenced the radio forever, but damaging a car beyond repair is an entirely different story, well, that's unless you have dynamite at your disposal. I could have quartered a stick and cleanly blown a crack into each engine at a decent noise level, but even though I knew it would reveal my position to everybody within a ten-miles radius, my mind was already set on creating an inferno. They had no idea who I was yet, and I planned to use their fear to my advantage, so I wrenched a whole rod into each vehicle's tank and let it rain spare-parts in the jungle before running off.

…


	6. Headstrong Chapter 6

To get back to the diamond business: yes, acts of terror, to a big part financially motivated, were nothing unusual in this region. That the attackers had frequently been identified as marauding Rwandan soldiers, that was quite plausible too. The unneeded violence and the fact that all companies were suffering losses made it all the more believable, but the frequency and level of organisation behind the robberies appeared somewhat suspicious to me nevertheless. Here I had involuntarily entered the stage, and was probably holding the proof in my hands now that indeed something was foul.

Fortunately nobody had discovered my hidden backpack and so I spent the next hour in a makeshift tent with a pocket dictionary, comparing the map with my own and trying to figure out the meaning of the documents. I can decipher hieroglyphs and second-century Chinese with a decent textbook, but this fact only doubled my frustration when those damned military abbreviations left me completely clueless. I counted nineteen different call signs and twice that number of radio frequencies, only eleven markings on the map though, so I couldn't be sure if those were troop positions, targets, meeting points or the secret hideouts of Santa Claus. The headcount of the group had been something between twenty and thirty, mostly children, too small to pose a serious danger to a well protected dig site, multiply that number of assault rifles by nineteen though and you can put an awesome amount of lead in the air.

This was grand scale.

Every organisation who's members wear uniforms follow a hierarchy, every hierarchy roughly resembles a pyramid and every pyramid I knew had a tip. That tip I was intended to find. The only mind-boggling detail that just wouldn't fit for me was this GPS receiver, a much too expensive gadget for the general picture in my opinion. Rebel armies have funded their operations through 'conflict-diamonds' for decades, by underhand selling of raw stones which they had unearthed themselves in occupied regions. It's becoming increasingly difficult lately though, because of successful industry self-regulation, only recently the company Congo-Brazzaville was severely punished for failing to prove the source of its exports. How could such a large amount of rocks be turned into cash without creating unwanted attention? If some foreigner was paying for this campaign, then he either had means to let the diamonds disappear somehow, or the profit was an indirect one.

It would take some time and a bit of help to make sense of this, but first I had to get out of this jungle alive and find means of communication. I quickly checked my own position on the map and swallowed heavily. I was surrounded by those markings. If those indeed represented other camps then I had to get moving instantly, or I would find myself in a world of hurt by tomorrow. Sure the rainy weather helped me, it would blind them and hinder them in their movement, making it much easier for me to slip through, the real problem was the geography. I was more or less trapped in this valley, the cliffs on both sides were too steep and much too crumbly to climb during wet season without proper equipment, the waterfall a perfectly vertical drop of one-hundred and twenty-seven metres of solid granite and the river mouth, so to say the only exit, bore a fat black marking on my newly acquired map, in close proximity to a second.

I quickly stuffed my things together and started hiking for the mountains. According to my map there was a small high-plateau, nicely overlooking the Lualaba embouchure, steep but still reachable. Even though it wouldn't let me exit the valley, vehicles also wouldn't be able to get up there and I could take my time waiting till the coast was clear with a good view of the surroundings.

The climb was, in fact, quite horrible. The continuous rainfall had dangerously softened the soil and more then once I almost died in small landslides that I had set off, desperately clinging to roots and liana like a barnacle to prevent myself getting washed all the way down again.

When I finally dragged my aching body over the edge I first remained lying flat on my belly for quite some time, panting for air, caked in mud from head to toe and abysmally cursing Africa, this idiotic continent. Your luxury shower with nine separately tuneable sprinkler heads is the first accomplishment you bitterly remember to appreciate once you clean your mouth and nose in a muddy slop on the ground, just so you can breathe freely again. And your triple locked super security entrance door is the next thing you remember to appreciate, once you look up from the puddle to find yourself face to face with a full grown mountain gorilla.

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	7. Headstrong Chapter 7

See, I adore animals…I pay the running costs for an obese hippo in the London zoo. His name is Fred. I am one of the most generous donors to Greenpeace, the WWF, and I whole-heartedly support a number of radical anti-whaling groups. I am a founding member of the South-Sussex branch of the 'Global Initiative for Animal Rights and Welfare'. Admitted, I was kind of blackmailed into it. But I have even spent a considerable fortune and bought my own, personal, cuddly-woodily six-thousand and two hundred square miles of some bloody Central-American rainforest. Go ahead and google "Croft National Park"…

Fuck it, I thought, when the beast suddenly reared on its hind legs and with a deafening roar presented two shiny white rows of perfect, inch long carnassials hardly an arms length from my exposed throat. I pulled my gun and plastered the brains of this stupid monkey all over the tree behind it, then mumbled something about survival of the fittest to myself while I continued to scrub my face clean in one of the puddles. When finally my vision had cleared and the shock began to wear off, also my common sense returned and, late but kindly, informed me that firing several gunshots was an extremely idiotic thing to do in an area that was quite possibly already swarming with soldiers on the lookout for their diamonds and me carrying them. That realisation quickly got my cramping legs going again, I scrambled to my feet and hastened to move on.

'Genious', I sighed ruefully, and angrily began hacking away at the wet bushes that were slowing my continued progress towards the setting sun. The brushwood was thick and thorny, forming an almost impassable barrier that constantly tugged at my clothes, entangled my limbs and my backpack, left bloody scratched on my bare arms and in general seemed to go to great efforts to get me killed as soon as possible. According to my map, the plateau should have been about two kilometres in diameter: what I didn't realize was that at this time, the map was already two and a half years old, which roughly equals 'totally worthless' in a region where erosion can wash away medium sized mountains in a matter of weeks. Yet, imagine my surprised outcry when suddenly in between two steps and a curse the ground beneath my feet broke away and sent me flying. Where a mere moment ago I had suspected nothing else but even more of that stroppy coppice, the world now ended in an overhanging rock face, with stupid me dangling almost head down from the edge, thanks to some thorny roots that miraculously supported my fall at the price of near unbearable pain in my right leg. Naturally I was pedalling and fidgeting like mad, my nose bleeding, my own backpack almost strangling me, now that it was hanging from my neck, my wet hair blurring my vision and rapidly turning images of grey sky, red mud, and brown water plus an unpleasantly long way down kaleidoscoping before my eyes.

Ten minutes and a good dose of superhuman effort later I was back on what I deemed solid ground for now, recuperating from this extremely unpleasant experience by eliminating ninety percent of my whiskey iron reserves in a single draft. Even the weather in good old England didn't seem so bad any more from my point of view, alright, the rain can give you the occasional pneumonia, but at least it doesn't carve unexpected trenches into the landscape. Good news, I had learned two valuable pieces of information while in my involuntary, uncomfortable lookout. A: The charming, usually crystal blue Lualaba sidearm had turned into a gigantic, filthy stream and flooded almost two thirds of the valley. And B: the black marking on the map was indeed another camp, situated about thirty metres right below my current position and absolutely no way around it on the ground. Fortunately humans have this understandable reluctance to look upwards during a thunderstorm, obviously even if they hear something that could be cries and gunfire.

For a seriously long time I did nothing but cowering in the ankle-deep quagmire of my self-imposed exile, tearing my hair and calculating the risks of dim-witted escape plans that on second thought were all surefire methods of dieing mutilated. My best bet was waiting for nightfall and trying to sneak through, or an attempt to reach the river and let it wash me all the way downstream to Kindu, civilisation and most importantly, telecommunication. Given I didn't meet any waterfalls or crocodiles on the way. My stomach ached, I was wet to my bones, by now seriously agitated and sitting on a dead ape, because frankly, it was the only solid thing to sit on around here, so I strongly opted for not losing any more time.

Most of my belongings I had to leave behind, or risk the weight of the backpack drowning me later. Every smallest part of my already light gear that wasn't quintessential for survival I threw away, tightly wrapping the rest into my tarpaulin which I corded up like a sack, in hope of keeping the stuff inside dry if at all possible, before repacking it. I didn't want to go back down the way I had climbed up for fear of pursuers, jumping from this height was no option, and the nylon cable would be too short to lower me all the way to the ground, but at least the plant life had already proven it was capable of holding my weight. Judging from up here, it was definitely possible to risk a Tarzan-like swing and manage a drop directly into deep water, so I reckoned, if I could just gather some momentum first. What I really needed was a distraction to perform my stunt right above their heads unnoticed. But how do you frighten armed soldiers with toilet paper? How do you scare the living shit out people with a tent peg? Is there a way of creating panic with a sewing kit?

Being a disturbed, spoilt, only child upper-class brat had its benefits for once, and I purposely waited for the majority of the soldiers to sit around the fire eating to archive maximum effect. When a partially gutted, dead gorilla, wrapped in burning toilet paper came crashing right into one of the lorries, its eyeballs forcefully removed and an assortment of tent pegs sticking out of its skull in Hellraiser style, the ensuing chaos left very little to be desired. They actually shot that thing again and once again for safety before approaching it, and I noisily hit water long before anybody even so much as raised a weapon in my general direction.

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	8. Headstrong Chapter 8

I watch some giant insect having fun with my sunshades while my clothes are up for drying. There's very little light breaching through the dense ceiling of green above, and the hot moisture in the air makes me sleepy, even despite the impressive noise from the natural habitants. After a week or so you manage to blend out that din subconsciously when you need a snooze, no matter what levels of perversion the vervet monkeys are forcing upon each other. The giant insect has begun to do even funnier things to my sunshades meanwhile. Germination wherever you spit. I know I'll soon begin to hate it and again long for the clinical lifelessness of the polar region, but right now I am victorious and feel young and sassy, so screw it. Remind me to clean my sunshades though.

Tightly clutching some piece of driftwood I must have spent hours in the water, because by the time I crawled back on dry land the sun was down and I couldn't feel my toes any more. Some decent chaps from Medecins Sans Frontieres had decided to erect a building that consisted of more than just a couple banana leafs in this godforsaken place, in a futile effort to at least vaccinate the local population against polio and diphtheria, and I found my dearest prayers answered when there was fresh water, a hot meal and a satellite radio.

Speaking of answered prayers, I felt almost flattered by the diligence which was put into my medical examination, but unfortunately the doctor was a meaty, bearded German in his mid-fifties, and while he was a charming fellow and might have looked quite handsome two decades ago, he didn't exactly fit my picture of potential hammock company at the moment. Besides, there were about half a million people waiting outside with real problems. According to my medical record I am undernourished, have a skin rash, a mildly enlarged, palpable liver, and something else that is nobody's business really, which kind of declared me the healthiest person in the area. I received a tetanus shot and a cold beer and I paid in cash for a dry place to sleep, modern medicine at its best.

In a soft moment I offered the diamonds to the doctor, they equalled at least two million pound sterling I roughly estimated after a brief inspection. His reaction was embarrassing, yet intriguing. Throwing them into the river was what he recommended first, and for the love of god not to show them to anybody ever again if I had any survival instinct, all the while keeping a respectable distance as if the stuff was being radioactive. A somewhat understandable suggestion after I thought about it for a while, down here the stuff was less than worthless. It was bad luck in a pouch. You wouldn't even be able to buy a loaf of bread without risking a bullet.

I spent half a day alone with a beer in my hammock, brooding over the incident, and came to the conclusion that basically, there were only two options. Either there was a direct profit, the soldiers bartered the hot stones with a foreigner who in turn would deliver supplies that actually had some value here, like weapons, vodka or porn for all that I knew. But there are a couple of noticeable flaws in that theory. For example, it is extremely dangerous work. Running your own mines in an area you completely control, maybe coercing the locals to do the work and then pompously inviting some arms dealer to your own private air strip is one thing. Openly attacking foreign businesses under government protection, that's an entirely different risk factor. And where is the benefit? Such guerrilla warfare is a most back-breaking undertaking, for the guerrilleros mostly. It's a job, hardly a way of living. And why would they send kids running through the jungle at the arse of the world with the equivalent value of a Lamborghini on their bodies? How can you get diamonds out of a warzone that has the size of Switzerland, but not a single useable airfield?

Maybe the profit is an indirect one. Maybe the diamonds don't have to be moved at all. And those guys hadn't appeared like freedom fighters to me, they received modern hardware and detailed orders. Such raids would be a convenient way of throwing rivals out of business, to obtain a monopoly on the Congo diamond market. Economic tactics. Absurd? Why? The question would be: Who?

It was time to do some research. I had to haul a bulky metal box all the way up to the Mananga plateau to gain a stable satellite connection and it cost me two thirds of the battery pack, but a dozen calls later my inquiries confirmed that only one company would probably benefit from all the turmoil: De Beers.

…

De Beers runs most of the diamond mines in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana that long produced the bulk of world supply of the best gemstones. It brings all of its rough stones to a clearing house in London and sorts them into thousands of grades, judged by colour, size, shape and value. For decades, if anyone had rough diamonds to sell on the side, De Beers bought these too, adding them to the mix. A huge stockpile helped it to maintain high prices while it successfully peddled the myth that supply was scarce. De Beers once controlled some 80 percent of the world supply of rough stones, but this stable, established and monopolistic system is now falling apart.

Other big miners have got hold of their own supplies of diamonds, far away from southern Africa and from De Beers' control. In Canada, Australia, Russia and now Congo, rival mining firms have found huge deposits of lucrative stones: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Alrosa have been chipping away at De Beers' dominance for two decades. De Beers almost lost its footing in Congo when arch-rival Leviev moved in full force. That was until the raids had started…

…

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	9. Headstrong Chapter 9

As of today, the rough diamond market is still highly concentrated, with De Beers holding a market share of more than forty percent, effectively making it the top dog among only a half dozen noteworthy competitors. And through the undying, London-based DTC - or 'Diamond Trading Company' - De Beers diligently sorts, values and retails about two thirds of the world's annual supply, thus being almost the only one controlling the entire pipeline from mine to customer. In fact, De Beers considers itself the 'custodian of the diamond market', enabling it 'to co-ordinate and regulate the supply of diamonds in pursuit of price stability and consumer confidence.' A formulation only a truly dedicated PR department can come up with. Forbes once entitled De Beers 'the most successful cartel in the world'.

So to sum things up, for half a century De Beers had bought virtually all, and I mean all, of the rough stones that were unearthed everywhere across the globe, and then sold them to a selected group of exclusive direct buyers called 'sightholders'. Back then Lev Leviev had been one of those people. He bristled under De Beers' high-handed treatment of buyers, who were given boxes of rough diamonds at take-it-or-leave-it prices and risked being permanently cut off if they balked. Leviev pulled an end run around the DTC when he began dealing directly with diamond-producing governments, thus shattering De Beers' all-important relationship with the dependent sightholders. Trumping De Beers has made Leviev very rich, today that little-know Uzbekistan-born Israeli is the world's largest cutter and polisher of precious gems. And I have a hunch that his ubiquitous brigade of burly armed guards isn't just for show.

Let me use an analogy to give you a better image of the situation: If you were Bill Gates, would you order Steve Jobs to be assassinated? No, because that would be an extremely foolish, and also totally useless thing to do. The production of IPods wouldn't stop all over a sudden. But you could try to undermine Apple's efforts wherever legally possible, by poaching its designers, scaring its sub-contractors, disconcerting its customers. And, if you were either daring or outright desperate, you could occasionally even arrange for unfortunate accidents in its production queue to happen…

…

Of course all this was a mere theory. Hardly an educated guess even. Nothing but speculations mostly. Downright implausible, goddamnit. And without proof you don't go ahead, walk into the nearest police station and accuse the world's largest rough diamond supplier, with a yearly turnover of roughly eight billion US dollars, of organised crime. Even if you HAD proof, you should think twice. Especially if 'walking into the nearest police station' means three days by boat or ten days hiking through the Congo. Either way, at the moment the best possible outcome was making a complete dick of myself.

Nevertheless I wanted to salve my guilty conscience by turning my finds over to the local authorities, and since this secluded blotch was part of some grey border zone in between government and rebel controlled areas, this meant the military. I paid ten bucks for saying hello, thirty to prevent a body cavity search, fifty for admission to someone who I was informed would be able to understand and communicate in French, the bloody national language by the way, another fifty for being allowed to present my request, one hundred, because a request of this magnitude definitely had to be brought before a superior, who usually demanded sixty US dollars in advance if you wanted so much as knock at his door, plus another sixty if you didn't come to arrange an appointment but wanted to knock at said door right away. For a moment I thought about accelerating the process with a little help from my newfound diamonds, but fortunately remembered the doctor's warning and wisely opted against it. All in all, I lost roughly five hundred brand-new American dollars only to be told politely that everybody knows perfectly well about those bastards and their little kindergarten army sitting up there in the mountains already, but that a serious shortage of weapons, manpower, funds and whatnot makes an effective intervention outright impossible. With a good prospect of what the future will be like if we continue to reduce the salaries of our public servants, I left the building. Fuck this guilty conscience, I need it surgically removed before cannot afford it any more.

I had hoped for the diamonds to have been laser marked. Of course they were not. The serial number on the MP, other than revealing the weapon having been part of some semi-official arms deal with the Rwandan army in the late 1980's, was worthless info. Unfortunately I am not much of a detective, unless it involves tracing lost property. I am not even an exceptional researcher, I have my sources and pay them handsomely. Subtle persuasion, interrogation and collecting evidence aren't among my strengths either, but scouting, tracking and surveillance under adverse conditions are right in my field of expertise. No need for brilliance, if you're just resourceful and tenacious. Spin the globe and point your finger at a random location, within twenty-four hours I will reach the place if need be. I still had a map with mysterious markings on it, and even if probably none of them hinted at cult places, temple ruins or forgotten cities, I was curious and pretty sure that I could find more diamonds and maybe even some answers at one of those locations.

Obtaining good equipment for this task was much easier than I had expected. According to the Time Magazine issue May 06', at least three millions of a monthly eight-million-dollar defence budged, granted to the Congolese armed forces to pay its soldiers, are stolen on a regular basis before reaching their designation. Talk about one giant security risk. The chronically penniless soldiers usually fix this situation by erecting their private 'toll-stations', you find those roughly every two-hundred metres on public roads around here. Quite a gross national product deflator, I guess the correct technical term for this is 'brigandism', and of course it's illegal, yet there's little the government can do about it without conjuring yet another nationwide catastrophe. I could probably have bought a battle-tank, had I carried the necessary change with me, but all I really needed for now were some sturdy field binoculars, a new pair of comfortable walking boots and a sharp machete. You can only do so much with modern day tricks like satellite reconnaissance, in the end nothing beats going out and putting your own nose into the dirt the old fashioned way if you want to know what's going on. Believe it, that's the reason why the Mossad has a sizeable track record, and the bloody CIA has not.

The following day I set out and began working off my list.

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End file.
